Geiger #5 // Review
The nuclear football is now in different hands. This might be good news for a girl named Halee, but it might not be enough for her little brother Henry. Things look good in a very capable post-apocalyptic facility, but they’re far from perfect for everyone, as brother, sister, and their defender discover in Geiger #5. Writer Geoff Johns continues to crawl his way through cold war-era nuclear war sci-fi tropes that are capably brought to the page by artist Gary Frank and colorist Brad Anderson. Though the story still hasn’t generated much originality, the visuals of Geiger, Barney, and the two kids he’s looking after strike some resonant emotional territory.
Halee and Henry are safe. They have been captured, but they’re safe. The man who led them into the captivity of safety is a legend of the post-apocalyptic wastes known as Tariq Geiger. Those in power seem to be developing the beginning of the next great civilization, but there’s a darkness underneath it all. Halee is wanted by authorities because she was found in possession of a powerful artifact. Henry isn’t quite so lucky. Thankfully, both Halee and Henry have a friend in Geiger and his vicious 2-headed dog pet named Barney. It might be the early stages of post-nuclear paradise, but Geiger, Halee, and Henry are going to have to escape.
The post-apocalyptic loner is now totally dedicated to keeping track of a pair of kids. He was reluctant to look after them, but now he’s willing to risk his life to see that they’re protected. Even Johns’ script for this particular chapter isn’t specifically ripped-off of every other nuclear holocaust story, it’s familiar enough that it certainly FEELS as though it is. Johns actually does a pretty good job of making the emotions connect with the reader, even if the overall plot seems all-too-familiar. Place the right characters in the right kind of hell, and any reader would have to be a jerk not to feel something for them, but Johns really needs to find something unique about this story to make it anything more than a weird exercise in dystopia.
Frank and Anderson do some beautiful work on this issue. Anderson gives the heroically glowing protagonist an electrifying radiance, who seems to have found just the right shade of light, yellowy green. Barney, the two-headed wolf, looks positively badass in the overwhelmingly inky shadows that Frank is painting in between the gutters at issue’s end. And once more, the crushingly heartbreaking humanity of Halee and Henry is vividly brought to the panel in a variety of emotions thanks to particularly inspired dramatic work by Anderson.
Johns has been working in comics for long enough to know to trust a pair of great artists. Hand Frank and Anderson a decent idea, and they can really run with it. The problem is that 90% of the issue is tied up in hackneyed post-apocalyptic narrative that really doesn’t need to be there. Give the artist a bit more room to run with the basic iconography of the action, and Geiger could be AMAZING...a glowing warrior of the wastes patrolling the end of humanity with his vicious two-headed wolf? That would be very, very cool. It’s too bad that Johns is trying to lay in so much else around a simple, enjoyably iconic idea.
